Nokia won’t save Windows Phone, Microsoft won’t save Nokia

Every blogger worth his chops predicted, or at least had an inkling, that Microsoft would buy Nokia after the two companies entered a partnership in 2011. It was always a question of when. Still, when it happened today, it came as a surprise.

Much of this is because of the phenomenal nature of the deal. Nokia is an iconic brand. Any deal that spells its end is obviously going to leave people a bit shell-shocked, even though we knew it was coming. But some of this is also because there is little value, at least on the face of it, in this deal.

I don’t think it is going to fundamentally alter the fortunes of either of the companies involved.

The part that Microsoft is not going to save Nokia is easy to explain. In fact, Nokia, as we know it, is dead even though the brand name remains with whatever that has been left of the Finnish company. There is a strong possibility that once the deal is complete, we will never see another Nokia-branded phone. Nokia, the company that still has the HERE maps and the network-equipment business, is going to survive as a shadow of its former self. Though, I doubt it will survive for too long. The company may already be looking for buyers who can take HERE and the network-equipment business off its hands.

It’s a fire sale. The phone business was the soul, heart and mind of Nokia. With the phone business gone, it is the end of the road for the company.

The second part is slightly trickier to explain. The idea behind the deal is that Nokia will help Microsoft build better phones, which will compete with the iPhones and Androids.

The interesting bit here is that Nokia was already helping Microsoft build better Windows Phone devices as part of its exclusive agreement. The Finnish company had full focus on Windows Phone. Its best engineers and designers were exclusively working on Windows Phone devices.

This deal changes little other than the fact that these people will now be paid by Microsoft and not by Nokia. They will still do the same job.

Microsoft has been too slow to fix Windows Phone. When the company launched the OS – called Windows Phone 7 – in 2010, it lacked many basic features. There were few customization options. Even the feature to cut and paste text was missing. Microsoft took nearly eight months to add some features with an update called Mango. A few months later, another minor update came in the form of Tango.

In 2012, Microsoft launched Windows Phone 8. While it was an improvement over Windows Phone 7, it was not enough to keep pace with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. To understand how slow Microsoft has been, see how fast Google has updated and added features to Android. In two years, Microsoft updated Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8. This means two major releases. In the same duration, Google updated Android a whopping 10 times!

Even now, when Microsoft knows that there are crucial gaps in the Windows Phone OS, it can’t speed up the development. The OS is badly in need of a notification system. But even over a year after Windows Phone 8 launched, there is no sign that the notification system is coming to the OS. Windows Phone users had hoped that GDR updates in 2013 would add missing features to their devices but, so far, all GDR updates have turned out to be minor.

Microsoft’s deal with Nokia is not going to fix Windows Phone. The development of this OS is slow because Microsoft is slow.

The problems with Windows Phone are not because Microsoft is not making its own phone. It is also not because Nokia is a separate company. On its part, Nokia has done a commendable job promoting Windows Phone. It even tried to plug gaps within the OS even though that is the job Microsoft should have been doing.

Windows Phone is a mess because Microsoft has so far failed to fix it. It will remain a mess unless Microsoft fixes it. Buying Nokia’s phone business is not a solution.

Author

Javed Anwer is a geek at heart, a man of gizmos, gadgets and games. He spends the better part of his nights, and sometimes days too, roaming the virtual alleys of WWW. When he is not on the Internet, he is most likely tweaking his computer to coax more out of it. When he is not doing any of these, he writes for The Times of India. In this blog, WebWise, he tries to document his rendezvous with technology.

Javed Anwer is a geek at heart, a man of gizmos, gadgets and games. He spends the better part of his nights, and sometimes days too, roaming the virtual all. . .